Learning by wrong-doing: aspiration and transgression among German pupils after the Thirty Years' War

Early modern schools have long been known to have been unruly places. Yet historians have struggled to contextualize violence and other forms of transgressive behaviour committed by pupils, either interpreting such behaviour as part of a virtually timeless culture of children and youth or as a reflection of a decline in morals due to macro-historical events. This article adopts the sociological concept of aspirational reference groups to analyse pupils' transgressive behaviour such as drinking, brawling and carrying rapiers in the context of the violence frequently committed by early modern adults. It does so on the basis of disciplinary cases which have survived as part of the exceptionally well-preserved papers of a teacher-scholar at a Lutheran Latin (grammar) school in Saxony. Pupils' transgression reflected their humanist training and foreshadowed the culture of students. Transgressive behaviour at schools prepared pupils for the similarly violent and hierarchical culture of early modern universities. Though subject to disciplinary measures on the part of urban authorities, pupils' transgression was in fact essential in perpetuating a common code of behaviour for men of learning in the decentralized Holy Roman Empire and therefore served to stabilize rather than destabilize existing hierarchies in early modern society.     

Eliciting and Combining Decision Criteria Using a Limited Palette of Utility Functions and Uncertainty Distributions: Illustrated by Application to Pest Risk Analysis

Utility functions in the form of tables or matrices have often been used to combine discretely rated decision‐making criteria. Matrix elements are usually specified individually, so no one rule or principle can be easily stated for the utility function as a whole. A series of five matrices are presented that aggregate criteria two at a time using simple rules that express a varying degree of constraint of the lower rating over the higher. A further nine possible matrices were obtained by using a different rule either side of the main axis of the matrix to describe situations where the criteria have a differential influence on the outcome. Uncertainties in the criteria are represented by three alternative frequency distributions from which the assessors select the most appropriate. The output of the utility function is a distribution of rating frequencies that is dependent on the distributions of the input criteria. In pest risk analysis (PRA), seven of these utility functions were required to mimic the logic by which assessors for the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization arrive at an overall rating of pest risk. The framework enables the development of PRAs that are consistent and easy to understand, criticize, compare, and change. When tested in workshops, PRA practitioners thought that the approach accorded with both the logic and the level of resolution that they used in the risk assessments.     

An Integrated Text Analytic Framework for Product Defect Discovery

The recent surge in the usage of social media has created an enormous amount of user‐generated content (UGC). While there are streams of research that seek to mine UGC, these research studies seldom tackle analysis of this textual content from a quality management perspective. In this study, we synthesize existing research studies on text mining and propose an integrated text analytic framework for product defect discovery. The framework effectively leverages rich social media content and quantifies the text using various automatically extracted signal cues. These extracted signal cues can then be used as modeling inputs for product defect discovery. We showcase the usefulness of the framework by performing product defect discovery using UGC in both the automotive and the consumer electronics domains. We use principal component analysis and logistic regression to produce a multivariate explanatory analysis relating defects to quantitative measures derived from text. For our samples, we find that a selection of distinctive terms, product features, and semantic factors are strong indicators of defects, whereas stylistic, social, and sentiment features are not. For high sales volume products, we demonstrate that significant corporate value is derivable from a reduction in defect discovery time and consequently defective product units in circulation.     

Conducting culturally competent evaluations of child welfare programs and practices

As the population of the United States has changed over the last two decades, so has the population of children who come to the attention of the child welfare system, resulting in increasing calls for cultural competence in all aspects of child welfare programming and practice. Given the changing demographics among children involved in the child weltare system and the increasing need to address the racial and ethnic disparities observed in this system, the need for culturally competent approaches to evaluate the outcomes of services for children and families is essential. This article discusses the challenges in conducting culturally competent evaluations and provides strategies to address those challenges within a child welfare context.     

Disentangling substantiation: The influence of race, income, and risk on the substantiation decision in child welfare

Understanding the source of disparities found at decision-making points along the child welfare pathway is essential to understanding and addressing the overrepresentation of African American children. Although research has documented the existence of disparities, it has been less successful in identifying the explanatory factors behind them. Critiques of research examining these disparities have suggested that poverty is likely a stronger explanatory factor than race, yet analyses that include measures of poverty using data from child welfare systems have largely not been conducted. This study uses data from the Texas child welfare system to identify the factors contributing to disparities at the substantiation decision. Given the relationship between poverty and child maltreatment, the analyses control for the effect of family income, as well as other factors related to maltreatment, to better understand the effect of race on this decision-making point. Findings indicate that when family income is controlled, race is not a significant factor in the substantiation decision. However, when also controlling for caseworker perceptions of risk, race emerges as the stronger explanatory factor. This suggests not only an important relationship between race, income, and risk assessment, but also that disproportionality in the child welfare system is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained by a single factor. These results further demonstrate that the effect of racial bias on decision-making remains an important consideration in understanding the overrepresentation of African American children.     

Child maltreatment dynamics among immigrant and U.S. born Latino children: Findings from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW)

Latino children are the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States, and the proportion of child maltreatment victims who are of Latino ethnicity has been growing since 2000. However, our knowledge of the characteristics, maltreatment patterns, and risk factors associated with maltreatment among immigrant and U.S. born Latino children and their families has been incomplete. The goals of this study are to establish the national prevalence of immigrant and U.S. born Latino children who come to the attention of child welfare systems in the United States; to expand our knowledge regarding the role of nativity in child maltreatment patterns among Latinos; and to determine if disparities in child maltreatment patterns and risks exist among Latino families using data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being. Despite considerable risks, data indicate that immigrant Latino children are slightly underrepresented among children who present to child welfare systems when compared to the general population. Moreover, no significant differences were observed between immigrant children and U.S. born children with regard to substantiation patterns. However, significant differences emerged between the two groups in risk factors and maltreatment type, warranting further investigation.     

Managing learning and developing management

Dr Alan Mumford is best known in the UK for his pioneering work on managerial learning and board-level development in the corporate sector. After his early career in the construction industry, he worked as an internal management development adviser to a number of UK companies before leaving fifteen years ago to join International Management Centres Europe as a professor. Alan continues to advise as an independent consultant and to devote time to writing. A prolific author, his classic text Management Development: Strategies for Action recently appeared in its fourth edition published by the Institute of Personnel and Development, and his reflections on board-level and senior executive development in Learning at the Top (McGraw-Hill, 1995). Of greatest renown is his collaboration with Dr Peter Honey on developing the Learning Styles Questionnaire and the Manual of Learning Styles (Honey, 3rd edn, 1992) which have become the most frequently used diagnostic and development tools on UK corporate management development programnles. Jean Woodall interviewed Alan at his home in London.

Jean Woodall is Professor of Human Resource Development at Kingston University.